The Sun now claims denied hacking is an "Xbox fraud cover-up"

The Sun have fought back against Microsoft's dismissal of its front page "exclusive," claiming Xbox Live was hacked by throwing out accusations of a cyber fraud "cover-up."

Earlier this week (Tuesday to be exact), The Sun ran a front page story in its newspaper about a "Crime Exclusive," reporting that thousands of Xbox Live accounts had been hacked, stealing millions of pounds in the process. Microsoft released a statement, denying claims of hacking, confirming that the infrastructure itself is safe, and stating that this was a case of a phishing scam (online attempts to con people into giving you their personal details).

And now, The Sun has released it's ever witty retort: purporting an elusive cover-up of the truth, claiming that "dozens of angry readers contacted [us] to tell how crooks bought Microsoft Points on their accounts to trade on to users in countries like China, Nigeria and Russia - even though they didn't pass on any personal details or visit phishing websites."

The report then goes on to talk how "many attacks are linked to popular FIFA 2012 from EA Games," something that happened in October and is most certainly a different story to what they told before.

Of course, as before, regardless of your correlation between how much you can trust them and how far you can throw them (never understood that saying), we encourage everyone to be proactive in keeping your details secure. Xbox Live phishers are pretty easy to spot.

UPDATE: Microsoft has made their response to today's story, telling The Sun again that they haven't been hacked. Full statement:

As we commented on Tuesday, the Xbox LIVE service has not been hacked. However, we are investigating a number of recent customer complaints relating to Xbox Live customer service - particularly in the way that we have processed refunds to customers that have been victims of phishing related fraud.

Consequently, we are taking several steps to address and resolve these particular issues as soon as possible and working closely with our affected customers to investigate and resolve any unauthorized charges made to their accounts resulting from recent phishing scams.

Finally we would like to apologise to any customers who have not experienced a good service from us.